


Sand in the cracks

by TerresDeBrume



Series: FotSM Verse [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Asexual Character, Culture Shock, Elves, Fantasy, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-19
Updated: 2013-08-19
Packaged: 2017-12-23 23:32:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,356
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/932387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TerresDeBrume/pseuds/TerresDeBrume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can take a sand elf out of the desert, but you’re always going to find sand in the folds of their clothes -and you can’t expect an Order-born elf not to think it’s itchy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sand in the cracks

**Author's Note:**

> I felt like writing something about them… there are some things that aren’t fully adressed, but then again that’s how it goes sometimes, and besides I needed to stop somewhere. So here, have this little tidbit of their live :)
> 
>  
> 
> Takes place a couple of centuries after _Don't talk, don't stop, don't look back_.

“Did you know,” Alamatheï asks when he pushes his head and silly, spiked hair through the door of Izayah’s preparation room, “that some of the Sunlit elves from the north pierce their nipples so they can put silver spikes through them?”

“You are forbidden from even thinking about it,” Izayah warns without raising his gaze from the cataplasm he was preparing, “until you learn not to put  _your_  nipples in my eyes everywhere I go.”

 

 

Alamatheï laughs, and the tips of his ears glow a bright, warm yellow, not unlike summer sun filtering through the leaves at the edge of a forest.

It often comes along with Alamatheï’s laughter, but Izayah has never heard of anyone else noticing this, perhaps because rarely anyone but Matheï comes into this office aside from other Healers in need of advice -and even then, Izayah rarely is their first choice.

When he was young, quite a while ago now, Izayah had only ever met people of his stature -which is to say people who rarely ever reached six feet of height, let alone Matheï’s ridiculous height of six feet and  _eleven_  inches… between his nature and the ridiculous hairdo adding to his height, it is honestly no wonder he keeps complaining about medicinal herbs getting lost in his hair.

Even now, he walks bent almost in half to avoid brushing with the bouquets of plants, hands constantly busy brushing away the grain and dried leaves that keep falling on his naked torso, occasionally catching in the fabric of his loincloth, just where slope of his hips drive them toward his groin… Izayah snaps his gaze back to its normal level, rolls his eyes when he is once again assaulted by Matheï’s nipples right in front of him, then cranes his head back to hear what his friend has to say.

 

 

“If you keep saying things like this,” Matheï chuckles, “the rumors concerning our uh… how do they put it again?”

“Frustratingly oblivious love affair,” Izayah mumbles as he goes back to his cataplasm, tugging at the edge of his headscarf –perhaps he shouldn’t have gone for the fitted cap this morning, and chosen a looser headscarf instead.

“Ah,” Alamatheï chuckles with something akin to fondness in his voice, “yes. And they say we lost poetry the day the Gods gave us magic.”

 

 

Izayah rolls his eyes at his cataplasm, then takes out the fabric he uses to wrap it so he can finish the preparation –the patient in the healing ward of the Flying Riders’ dispensary may be alone, but she won’t wait for her medication forever, whether Izayah has a visit or not.

Besides, the room is getting too warm, despite the breeze coming in through Izayah’s small window, the cold wind of summer at the top of a mountain.

 

 

“If you keep smiling when you refer to those rumors,” Izayah says, pouring the cataplasm out of his mortar and onto the fabric, “people are going to think you enjoy them… or worse,  _spread them_.”

 

 

Alamatheï’s laughter slips between the herbs on the ceiling, fills the room and flies out through the window, the sound almost tangible, tingling on Izayah’s skin.

 

 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Matheï chuckles once he calms down, “when I want to bed someone I proposition them, I don’t spread rumors.”

“The rumors mention a love affair,” Izayah points out, slipping under Matheï’s arm to reach the door and cross into a large hall full of beds surrounded by drapes, “not mere sexual intercourses.”

“As if they were mutually exclusive,” Alamatheï scoffs, following Izayah to lone child in the infirmary –a girl of the Blue Blood whose first menstruations are proving to be particularly straining, “or always linked, for that matter.”

“Many would disagree with you,” Izayah tells him while he adjusts the cover around his patient.

 

 

Alamatheï who, as always, focused on the dragon rather than the rider, doesn’t even pretend to consider the possibility and dismisses it with a swipe of his hand:

 

 

“Nonsense,” he says, “Anyone with a grain of sense knows an elf’s worth isn’t to be measured by how many partners they bedded… ask any of those who shared my bed, and you will see.”

 

 

Izayah finishes arranging the cataplasm on his patient’s forehead, then turns to look at Alamatheï’s profile.

His eyes are fixed on the dragonling as he inspects its wings with relaxed fingers –while Izayah’s are tightly clenched in the fabric of his ample green tunic, his lose desert pants shifting in time with the movement of his legs.

 

 

“It’s easy for you to say,” Izayah remarks, “when you only ever bedded people like you.”

 

 

The light in Matheï’s skin dulls, leaving his whole body looking darker, closer to brown than its usual amber shade.

 

 

“People like me?”

“People who know nothing of life,” Izayah says, then bites his tongue hard enough to draw blood.

“Nothing of—”

 

 

Leaving Alamatheï speechless is a rare exploit, but it usually feels a lot more satisfying.

 

 

“I mean,” Izayah pushes out, watching color flee from his knuckles, his tunic bunch between his fingers, “You have no idea what it is like in the real world. What society is like, what it is like to be different from them….”

“Oh,” Alamatheï retorts, “you mean the way  _you_  are different? Hiding behind all this fabric and trying to make people forget you have a body only because you are so scared of it?”

“I am not  _scared_  of my own body!” Izayah protest, feeling like his cheeks are about to take fire as he rises from his seat and sends his stool to the ground, “I never was!”

 

 

Below him, the girl stirs, and Alamatheï answers him with an angry hiss, fingers clenching into fists at his side:

 

 

“Then why is it you haven’t taken anyone to your bed yet, uh? Do not think I will believe your heartless façade, Izayah, I was there when you came to the Order, I saw how much you truly feel… you have never taken any lover, but not for lack of loving. Why is it, if not for fear of your own body?”

 

 

Alamatheï rose, too, although he didn’t disturb any furniture.

At first, Izayah steps back when he advances, but when Alamatheï gets too close he spins under his arm, then puts distance between them so as not to have to break his neck in order to look Alamatheï in the eyes.

This is ridiculous. They have known each other for almost two millennia, but Izayah cannot quite recall ever being that angry at Alamatheï –then again, they have never had this conversation before, either.

 

 

“I simply do not  _wish_  to take a lover,” Izayah hisses. Then, before Alamatheï can call him a liar: “I have no wish to bed anyone… ever –and the only fear that I feel is of what people would do if they found out!”

“Nothing!” Alamatheï answers with his eyes wide with shock, his voice still hushed –Izayah can hear the blankets shuffle on the bed though, the girl’s breathing quickening. “Nothing is what they’d do, so why does it even  _matter_ that you are different? Nobody is going to force you to do something you have no desire for! This isn’t how couples  _work_!”

“Not  _here_!”Izayah all but yells, “but back home—”

“Home?”

 

 

Never before has Izayah seen the fight go out of Alamatheï.

He knows what Matheï looks like when he is tired, and sad, and joyful –when he is angry, thankful, optimistic, determined… defeated doesn’t suit him.

 

 

“I cannot believe you still think of it as  _home_ ,” he says, voice almost too low for Izayah to hear, “I found you almost dead from heat and cold, from hunger and thirst, and all that without taking into account whatever they did to you that made you leave in the first place, and you still think of it as _home_?”

 

 

The way Alamatheï spits the word sounds remarkably like the intonation Izayah’s mother uses to speak of her native tribe, but now is certainly not the time to bring this up… then again, at this point there might not be anything Izayah  _should_  bring up, and so he doesn’t move when Alamatheï spins on his heels and leaves the infirmary without even bothering to fake pain when his forehead hits the threshold on his way out.

Izayah slams the door to his makeshift office and decides crushing herbs is more urgent than composing replies to the various letters he got from other Healers asking for advice and information.

 

 

**{ooo}**

Patrol leaves Izayah in dire need of a bath and a long, full night of sleep.

Although the bath can definitely wait.

Walking for hours on end, even at night, is nothing Izayah was ever unfamiliar with, even long before he came to the Order. In the desert, not everybody has a mount to carry them, and when they do, more often than not it is the luggage that ends up on its back, along with children and those whose condition doesn’t allow for long hikes –and the warrior, of course.

Women mount as soon as they can fight.

Boys and men, well.

They have good legs.

 

Izayah knows his bedchambers as well as the back of his hand which is why, on full moons like tonight, he hardly ever bothers to light a candle… which in turn explains why he startles when he comes back from his bathing alcove and discovers two spots of lights shining above his bed, spread the exact width of Alamatheï’s ears.

 

 

“Haven’t you mastered the art of shining  _everywhere_  by now?” Izayah asks, letting his hand fall away from the clasp of his headscarf.

“You of all people should know that I can’t,” Alamatheï answers. “My magic doesn’t work this way.”

 

 

Neither does Izayah’s… in his case, blood magic is his dominant one, but the rest on his ancestry shows in the way he can make his eyes shine when he needs to, the two paths of light looking like smaller beacons in the night.

Alamatheï’s dominant magic may be light, but the way it mixed with earth magic still means he cannot use it as a full-blooded Sundwelling elf would.

 

 

“Have you come to fight again?”

 

 

Neither of them is moving, and Izayah keeps his back straight, his face blank, even though he knows Alamatheï is practically blind at night… moving means breaking the thin status quo they have right now, and not necessarily for the best.

There’s no need to risk making a bad situation become worse.

 

 

“I wanted to apologize.”

 

 

Alamatheï’s arm comes forward, and the smell of wildflowers drifts to Izayah’s nostrils, sweet, cloying, and somewhat tired from the wait. He takes a cautious step forward, then takes the bouquet -a little worse for the wear- from Alamatheï’s hand and feels his way to the pitcher he keeps in his bedchambers, making sure there is some water left before he arranges the flowers in it.

 

 

“So did I,” Izayah says without turning away from the flowers.

 

 

From the corner of his eyes, he can see the light of Alamatheï’s ears flicker as he shakes his head, but aside from that slight movement he is notably still -something that rarely ever happens when Matheï is not injured.

For a long while, neither of them speaks, Izayah pretending he is still fiddling with the flowers, back burning with the weight of whatever Matheï isn’t saying… though to be fair, it isn’t like he is volunteering any word of his own.

 

Alamatheï, as is often the case, breaks the silence first, with a sigh.

 

 

“I realized you were right,” he admits, dejection clear in his voice, “I did only bed Order-born elves.” A chuckle, humorless. “Considering how few of us are even within my age range, it is amazing I never noticed this before.”

“I suppose you were looking for people who would understand you,” Izayah tells him with a slight shrug. “People who wouldn’t be hurt at the thought of you only wanting their bodies for a few nights, and nothing more… the elves from outside did not have the father that you had.”

“Dragons,” Alamatheï corrects. “The dragons raised me, not my father.”

 

 

Izayah turns back toward him, eyebrows furrowed.

 

 

“I did not know this.”

“Oh, not many people know, and few of us even remember it… I think Zoanie might remember some of it. Probably.” Alamatheï shrugs again, and this time Izayah leaves his spot near the drawers to go and sit next to him, shoulders bumping together in the process. “Elves suffered a lot from the Split -I think we lost over half of our population of the time?” Izayah nods. “Dragons though… Aleenya says there were about five hundreds of them left when she came to the Mountains of Leaves.”

 

 

Izayah nods, perplexed by this piece of history he never learned about.

Classes at the Order aren’t… well. They aim to make sure everyone will be able to complete the tasks assigned to them, and that they will trust both their fellow Dragonriders and the Order itself not to disintegrate around them… for now, what they need above all is cohesion, not history.

 

Beside, having spoken with a few survivors of the Split, Izayah knows it isn’t an experience that is easily recounted.

He can only imagine what it was like, to be one of the Old Elve and suddenly feel your body changing to accomodate magic, to watch your friends and children die all around you and wonder whether or not you would survive, to hear the scream of people whose body rejected magic and died for it… that can’t have been easy.

 

 

(Izayah has seen elves die this way before. Elflings, born without the ability to adapt to magic, but older elves, too, adults who had time to build a life and family before the first signs started showing, people who would cry and hold their loved ones, and eventually begged for an end to their misery.

He remembers every single one of their faces.)

 

 

“How many riders?” Izayah asks when it seems like Matheï won’t speak again of his own volition.

“Two hundreds,” he says. “Maybe three. Some dragons survived longer without protection -I know of at least two of them who are alive and unbound today, though they avoid coming around. Most of the eggs didn’t survive back then, a lot didn’t even hatch. The memories aren’t very neat, I was so young… but I remember my father and the others were constantly gone, bringing any and everyone they could find to the mountain so the dragonlings could find partners. The children were left with the dragons… they fed us, raised us, taught us to survive. How did you think I knew how to hunt bare-handed?”

 

 

Alamatheï’s grin is sharp when he turns it toward Izayah, but there is a downward tilt to it that shouldn’t belong there, a hint of things he Matheï never shared with Izayah before –it makes his stomach clench with something he cannot name, sour and just shy of painful.

 

 

“Back then, only one out of ten eggs used to survive, and our parents didn’t have time for us. I remember sleeping with the eggs and listening to their heartbeats, the sound of their minds… when they died, it was like losing a friend, a sibling, almost.”

 

 

Matheï’s face turns to the flowers in their vase, the drawer Izayah’s only luxury, and when he continues the story it sounds like he wandered far away from the room, to times Izayah never experienced.

 

 

“I’ve never known any other life than this… I was twenty when Father and Seelim were bound. Dragons cared about the other children already, and I spent most of my time with them… Mother left three years later. The Order is the only home I have ever known, and the Dragons my only family…” Matheï hunches on himself, trying to make himself look smaller as he adds quietly: “It hurts to know you don’t think of us as home.”

“I try to,” Izayah tells him, trying to see his own hands in the dark, “I really do. You know what they say though, you can take an elf out of the desert, but you will always find sand in the folds of their clothes.”

 

 

Alamatheï nods, but it doesn’t feel sincere, doesn’t feel like he truly understands, so Izayah braces himself and continues:

 

 

“My mother was raped,” he says, feeling Matheï stiffen beside him. “Her birth tribe chased her, and she joined the tribe I grew up in as a last resort. She did her best, but she never quite managed to love me, and my ears…” Izayah tugs at the hem of his headscarf, heart beating hard in his chest. “She never managed to look at them. I don’t  _blame_  her for not loving me. I merely wish she could have. But,” he adds, straightening and adding strength to his own voice, “she always made sure I would be as safe as possible. So when my thousandth name day came and went, she was the one who urged me to live… before my wife could make me take my headscarf off and reveal what I was, you see?”

 

 

Matheï’s hand finds Izayah’s where it is still torturing the fabric of his headscarf, and he threads their fingers together –Izayah’s skin tingles where they touch.

 

 

“They would have shunned me. Killed me, maybe. She never could love me, but she still took a risk to preserve my life so…” the next breath is difficult to take, doesn’t quite want to come in, but Izayah forces on: “I love her, and I… I love my tribe, too but they only-they wouldn’t have loved me if they’d known who I was, if they’d known-if they’d know I wasn’t interested in coupling and-”

 

 

Izayah feels Matheï pull him to his chest just as his eyes start to sting, the taste of salt spills on his lips, like white-hot desert sand leaving burning trails on the skin of his cheeks, a sandstorm raging in his chest, fueled with debris he wasn’t ever conscious of.

It lasts, and lasts, and lasts –Izayah can hear Shra’an in the back of his mind, shouting and worrying, but it is difficult to hear him, as if his own spirit were clouded with whatever it is he is expelling until, at long last, Izayah stops shaking, his breathing stops hitching, and Shra’an stops asking.

 

Matheï’s arms around his waist almost hurt, and Izayah’s tunic feels wet where the other elf’s head is resting.

Izayah can’t help the chuckle that escapes him.

 

 

“I think this is the hardest I’ve cried in over four millenniums,” he says between two fits of laughter, “I feel ridiculous!”

 

 

Alamatheï snorts so hard he doesn’t even bother to wipe the tears from his face before he falls into a hysterical fit of laughter that soon has him literally fall off the bed –Izayah wonders, not for the first time, how he manages not to make the ground shake.

 

Afterward, when both of them are spent and breathing hard, Alamatheï’s ears glowing bright where he lies of the floor, Izayah sighs and smiles, chest warmer than it was before as he unclasps his headscarf tosses it on the bed, then unties his hair and lets it fall around his face and down to his waist.

For one moment, everything is silent as they breathe out the last of their hysteria, Izayah settling at the edge of the bed, face hanging above the ground so that his hair brushes against Matheï’s cheek. When the other elf looks up, Izayah remembers he never did take his headscarf off in front of anyone since he came to the Order and expects some form of comment on this.

 

What he gets instead is:

 

 

“You’re glowing.”

 

 

Izayah grunts and throws a pillow at Alamatheï’s face, instructing him to make himself comfortable wherever he wants.

 

(He meant the ground, but there is something to be said about waking up with the heartbeat of someone you trust thumping in your ear.)


End file.
